Strongest melee single target?

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gilrad wrote:

Earthquake beats everything pretty handily (with the exception of Molten Strike, but to get the most consistent benefit from that you can't have any global AoE nodes).

If you're doing one quake per attack, it has an effective damage effectiveness of around 300%.

But that's kind of niche unless you have the enchant (which is super expensive right now), since you're capped at around 0.7 second attack time.

If you go to the next breakpoint at one quake every two attacks however, that's still 200% damage effectiveness, again beating out every skill in the game except for the aforementioned Molten Strike setup.

Also, since all elements of the hit are AoE (compared to single-target skill + splash or many others like Molten Strike where the initial hit isn't an AoE), you get full benefit from conc effect.

If I were to do a theoretical six-link Earthquake for single-target, I'd go:

EQ
MPD
Less Duration
Conc Effect
Faster attacks if you can't get to the breakpoint through passives/gear
Either Poison or Added Fire, depending on how much generic increased damage you can apply to the poison.

About poison: Its duration is only 0.9seconds due to 20/20 less duration, but due to conc effect and the damage multiplier to LD that comes out to a total of around 18% more damage over 0.9 seconds. If you can get up to 200% total increased damage that also applies to the poison, that brings it to a very reasonable 56% more damage that doesn't care about elemental resists.

I tried molten and it was very strong even though I had no projectile scaling and 30% area from the tree. Was it significantly stronger or more versatile than conc effect EQ? No, not at all. It's also worthless in terms of aoe, it felt like an rng heavystrike that luckily did not also knockback and i would never devote 6 links just for a noticeably better ST over conc effect EQ.

EQ atm is the only skill melee in the game that puts melee even within a mile of ranged aoe all the while still retaining strong single target and does not rely on MS attack speed spam. If only only this skill had existed a year ago.

I had tried nearly every melee skill in the game and while cyclone has god tier mobility and ST, it has shit for AOE. While reave has god tier Aoe with 8 stacks, it has only mediocre ST and requires a lot of momentum to keep vaal stacks.

What is the breakpoint you're talking about?

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Physical Damage on the other hand has a much more even coverage. You cannot have negative reduction of physical damage, but enemies will never negate more than a dozen percentage points or so of your damage. This is consistent with my experience. All of my "physical builds" despite having substantial elemental components pretty much treat all enemies equally. Regardless of curse immunity, curse effectiveness, and elemental resistances, they all take roughly the same amount of damage. Only Life presents as a barrier between my phys builds and enemy death.

That point might actually bring my rambling tussle with xhul back on the original topic. Because when we talk about single target damage, we are talking about bosses. And bosses tend to have high elemental resistances and curse effectiveness reduction. So elemental builds are at a natural disadvantage compared to physical builds, unless using Inquisitor or maybe EE+double curse+curse effectiveness nodes. I believe that is enough to make the decision a little less obvious when considering single target, maybe even favouring physical based builds (even if it has substantial elemental conversion and addition)

I dont disagree with most of what you said but two things, maps can spawn up to 40% or more physical damage reduction and p2l+WED+melee phys will flat out beat most "soft" physical builds outright even factoring in resists. Throw in something over the top like a legacy vinktar and the retch and physical is left in the dust.

In the case of a conversion skill, you now turn a phys build into a pure ele build and you can now scale your damage using ele and WED from gear which can stack with those crummy 9-15 phys affixes.

No physical build will ever beat p2l+wed+conversion in terms of raw paper damage when built correctly.

so far i didn't see it mentioned here, but in my experience the best single target melee skill is double strike, at least that's what works the best on my crit builds.

The 300% damage breakpoint is somewhere around .72 attack time with no enchant and 20/20 less duration. Half that for the 200% breakpoint. One-third of that for the 175% breakpoint.

The breakpoints aren't 100% the delay, I've found if you get too close to it sometimes you get quakes that don't trigger.

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Nephalim wrote:

I dont disagree with most of what you said but two things, maps can spawn up to 40% or more physical damage reduction and p2l+WED+melee phys will flat out beat most "soft" physical builds outright even factoring in resists. Throw in something over the top like a legacy vinktar and the retch and physical is left in the dust.

Good and interesting points. I guess I don't have enough experience at the very top end game. Also I didn't know that physical damage reduction was a map mod. That's new with 2.0, right? Does it only spawn on red maps? Yellow + red? I've run what I thought was a fair share of yellow maps and never saw that mod.

Off topic again but I was already rather disappointed with physical's lackluster position in this game, now with that information about the very top end it's almost depressing. At least physical has the leech advantage, right? Right??? Who am I kidding, new generic leech nodes probably do the trick np.

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adghar wrote:

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Nephalim wrote:

I dont disagree with most of what you said but two things, maps can spawn up to 40% or more physical damage reduction and p2l+WED+melee phys will flat out beat most "soft" physical builds outright even factoring in resists. Throw in something over the top like a legacy vinktar and the retch and physical is left in the dust.

Good and interesting points. I guess I don't have enough experience at the very top end game. Also I didn't know that physical damage reduction was a map mod. That's new with 2.0, right? Does it only spawn on red maps? Yellow + red? I've run what I thought was a fair share of yellow maps and never saw that mod.

Off topic again but I was already rather disappointed with physical's lackluster position in this game, now with that information about the very top end it's almost depressing. At least physical has the leech advantage, right? Right??? Who am I kidding, new generic leech nodes probably do the trick np.

All maps spawn up to 20% phys reduction, mid tiers 30% and high tier 40%. I think High tier is 12-15 or it could be 13-15.

40% phys reduction is not as bad as 80% elemental reduction but the general rule of thumb is just to scale damage as high and as optimally as you can - this means finding ways to scale both damage types as well as finding ways to stack 'more' damage onto your main skill. Even if you arent using p2l+WED, 30% WED will still often compete or outright beat top tier flat phys rolls of 9-15 if you use both hatred and HoA and let's face it, there's no reason to not use hatred on a physical build because shattering is so goddamned satisfying.

Physical leech is still very strong because you can get it on jewels/master crafting/blood rage and .2-.4 phys mana leech is enough to susain most skills fully ,even without the duelist cluster. Keep in mind not all builds can not optimally reach the duelist cluster like wand users and some 2 handed builds.

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Kwaak wrote:

Molten strike is in my experience the strongest single target damage. It's useful in any situation and works wonders with lgoh.
I used this setup: Molten Strike - Multi Strike - Greater Multiple Projectiles - Concentrated Effect - melee physical damage (in case of a physical damage weapon) - LGOH. From the passive skill tree you get yourself Point blank for extra more damage.
With a fast weapon it provides nice life regeneration and with some crit. chance your surgeons mod flasks refill quick too.

Just try it.

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Etherfire wrote:

It seems that you're playing crit staff(endu charge on crit).

As I said before, EQ is probably the best, however molten strike is also pretty insane. It has a pretty high damage effectiveness, but it's the additional projectiles that take it over the top, even if they aren't supported by melee modifiers.

Edit: best links for molten strike single target dps are molten strike + wed + multistrike + added fire + melee phys + p2l/crit multi/crit strikes

Don't use gmp/lmp as it is a dps loss. You want to focus on your melee hit with the proj as secondary dps.

Why do you guys suggest Melee physical damage for motlen strike? It only increases the damage of the melee portion. I believe that for the 1st quote WED would be better and for the 2nd - GMP.

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ivkoto77777 wrote:

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Kwaak wrote:

Molten strike is in my experience the strongest single target damage. It's useful in any situation and works wonders with lgoh.
I used this setup: Molten Strike - Multi Strike - Greater Multiple Projectiles - Concentrated Effect - melee physical damage (in case of a physical damage weapon) - LGOH. From the passive skill tree you get yourself Point blank for extra more damage.
With a fast weapon it provides nice life regeneration and with some crit. chance your surgeons mod flasks refill quick too.

Just try it.

"

Etherfire wrote:

It seems that you're playing crit staff(endu charge on crit).

As I said before, EQ is probably the best, however molten strike is also pretty insane. It has a pretty high damage effectiveness, but it's the additional projectiles that take it over the top, even if they aren't supported by melee modifiers.

Edit: best links for molten strike single target dps are molten strike + wed + multistrike + added fire + melee phys + p2l/crit multi/crit strikes

Don't use gmp/lmp as it is a dps loss. You want to focus on your melee hit with the proj as secondary dps.

Why do you guys suggest Melee physical damage for motlen strike? It only increases the damage of the melee portion. I believe that for the 1st quote WED would be better and for the 2nd - GMP.

It still fully benefits from MPD due to how conversion works. Same for all conversion skills.

It's not the Physical portion of MPD that makes it problematic for Molten Strike. It's the Melee portion. The Projectile portion of Molten Strike (aka the little magma balls) is not considered Melee, which causes it to receive 0 bonuses from MPD. It is calculated separately from the Melee portion.

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Nephalim wrote:

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ivkoto77777 wrote:

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Kwaak wrote:

Molten strike is in my experience the strongest single target damage. It's useful in any situation and works wonders with lgoh.
I used this setup: Molten Strike - Multi Strike - Greater Multiple Projectiles - Concentrated Effect - melee physical damage (in case of a physical damage weapon) - LGOH. From the passive skill tree you get yourself Point blank for extra more damage.
With a fast weapon it provides nice life regeneration and with some crit. chance your surgeons mod flasks refill quick too.

Just try it.

"

Etherfire wrote:

It seems that you're playing crit staff(endu charge on crit).

As I said before, EQ is probably the best, however molten strike is also pretty insane. It has a pretty high damage effectiveness, but it's the additional projectiles that take it over the top, even if they aren't supported by melee modifiers.

Edit: best links for molten strike single target dps are molten strike + wed + multistrike + added fire + melee phys + p2l/crit multi/crit strikes

Don't use gmp/lmp as it is a dps loss. You want to focus on your melee hit with the proj as secondary dps.

Why do you guys suggest Melee physical damage for motlen strike? It only increases the damage of the melee portion. I believe that for the 1st quote WED would be better and for the 2nd - GMP.

It still fully benefits from MPD due to how conversion works. Same for all conversion skills.

The melee hit benefits. The projectiles do not. And they are about 50% or more of the skill's single target potential.

For slow-medium speed weapons, nothing beats EQ, which is kinda funny for a skill with massive aoe. A huge balance problem in my opinion.

For fast weapons, arguments can be made for Molten/Static/Viper/Heavy depending on the scaling your build uses.